Andi Schmied

During the IAS residency, I will adapt my doctoral thesis, Asset Town, into a series of public-facing outputs. Working with existing photographs, raw footage, and texts, I will develop a public lecture, an intermedia installation, and an artist’s book that places the project in dialogue with CEU’s intellectual community. Asset Town investigates how architecture functions as a financial instrument for the global super-rich. Through case studies in New York, London, and Dubai, as well as speculative megaprojects such as Saudi Arabia’s The Line, the project argues that contemporary high-end architecture is less concerned with habitation than with storing, concealing, and multiplying capital. From Manhattan’s supertall towers and London’s “iceberg houses” to Dubai’s artificial islands, these typologies demonstrate how financial speculation materializes in built form, reinforcing systems of inequality while producing displacement, ecological destruction, and the exploitation of labor. The research draws on covert ethnography: I adopted the persona of an ultra-wealthy buyer to gain access to properties otherwise closed to the public. This method revealed how architecture intersects with offshore finance, tax havens, legal loopholes, and branding logics that shape the urban condition in the 21st century.